invisible fence

the trouble is that the fence is never 
in the same place. i go running in search
of a raspberry bush & then there i am
at the edge of the words i have left.
sometimes the flies are fat & sometimes
they are just little flecks of hunger.
i dance headless as them. 
the raspberries turn into bed bugs & the city
wilts in august. i take a train without anyone else
inside just to get smacked with a fence.
i throw myself from the moving car
in an attempt to not be vivisected. 
the neighbor's dog used to have one 
just like this. i would watch the creature
bound right up to the halo. stand there
deciding whether or not he would accept
the shock collar consequences of his 
curiosity. as with most things, there is 
a decision between the pain of waiting
& the pain of breaking. neither are ideal.
i dream of flight. of alien abduction. 
lifted from the sand & into a worth i
do not have. they say heaven is above
because anywhere we can't reach is also 
a place without borders. i try to dig a hole 
beneath the fence. it just goes deeper
& deeper until we are at the core 
& our fingernails have dirt & grist in them. 
i write my name on one of the posts.
think of that one day when the dog
did push past. he ran all over town
while his owners chased him weeping.
escape involves betrayal. what was he looking for?
the dog got hit be a car & lived. that last part
was a lie i just didn't want to end
with the truth. they never took the fence down
or got another dog. in the dark i would see 
him running on the outside of the fence. 
once i went with him. he climbed into the clouds 
with our other tiny gods. 

lily pad

the water learns how to 
cover her face. i hear a baby crying
even though it is the middle 
of nowhere & nothing but stop signs 
are up this late. i sometimes go to 
the bathtub & find it full,
lily pads floating on the surface.
if i have been gone too long there will
be frogs in there too, leaping
from one pad to another & then beneath
the surface. there are so many ways
to hide. i have started looking at each room
as a game of hide & go seek. only,
the hide is a game of death or death.
i also look & ask myself, "where could
lily pads grow?" which is a question
about how we will manage to be beautiful
when we are trying to keep the most 
important secrets of our lives. i buy 
a plane ticket & do not take the plane.
the lily pads are in my coffee cup,
the one i don't wash because i like
how it tastes like dirt. a thin skin
of coffee stain. don't get me out of here.
don't fly the plane. give me all your lily pads
& i'll give you mine. i think people forget
that a lily pad is the full plant,
there is a flower floating. a little dream
of breathing with a tape recorder.
the frogs sing a mourning song.
i join them. the tub overflows &
we all get to be amphibians when
they come for us. 

bounce house

take your shoes off before
you get in my mouth.
we are on the roof without umbrellas
& there is a wet dog running across the sky.
i buy a pocket knife 
with the sole intention of saying
it was an accident. the house keeps
you jumping. you decide
to set higher & higher goals.
touch the ceiling & leave handprints.
i call a repair man in the middle
of the night & a flock of hissing cockroaches
arrive with a toolbox. it is our birthday.
the bounce house is for us. there is a cake
with someone else's name written
on the face. 
sometimes i want kids desperately.
like, i feel a space where our children
would live like voles beneath
the soil. the roots that, when removed,
always resemble the hair of my grandmother,
ragged & tangled near the end.
i bounce. feel my socks against
the vinyl. smooth. a carnival man 
peers in the window. we could sleep in here.
we could listen to the groan
of the air machine. i know tomorrow
it will be my birthday too. dog years. 
dog teeth. tearing the meat
from a street chicken bone. how do
you survive the pressure to smile?
grey balloons fill the sky. i call you
& you do not pick up. the number
leads nowhere. you get out of my mouth
& leave with a little party hat on.
we never talk again but i still
wonder about you. 

living stealth 

everyone is going stealth. 
a doctor asks me again, "when did you know?"
i buy a time travel machine on ebay
& go back to kill a pink balloon on a porch
in a photograph. i get my gender
from a corner store in a little fridge
next to the bottles of soda. it is a sepia tone
kind of year. it is a race car kind of year.
a past-my-bedtime kind of year. 
i stopped telling people i'm trans not because
i want to hide it but because i want people
to be unsure. my gender is uncertainty.
the perennial "which way are you going?"
i answer, "not home." i dig a hole in the yard.
i find a bunch of bird bones. i walk into
a car parts shop & i feel like the whole place
is staring at me. i'm pretty aware of when 
i do not really belong somewhere 
(which is most everywhere
if i'm being honest). i feel most alive
at thrift stores, antique shops, parking lots,
& somewhere in the woods off the trail.
the existence of stealth implies that there
are people who live loudly & openly. 
i have not met them. gender is just as much
about hiding as it is about telling. 
when i meet a man i know he has killed at least
one bird & buried the bones. when i meet a woman
i know that she has gone sleepwalking & woken up
in the dewy grass. i think loudness is overrated.
it is fun to have a secret. i love how shiny mine gets
when the government tries to peer in at it.

pennsylvania gothic

fog spills across the cornfields.
we have been driving through
finger woods for days. you use your phone flashlight.
reading a map from the 80s. we get service periodically.
a few texts. a snippet of a youtube video
you watch to keep yourself company.
everyone is alone in pennsylvania but 
especially travelers.  
we learn the names of lakes from the gps. 
drive to one & walk until we reach the shore. 
there are footprints of strangers. a church bell warbles
even though it is the middle of the night.
against our better judgment,
we drink from the lake. the trees turn 
into copperheads & chase us back to the headlights.
we drive & drive. pass the same strip mall
thirty times before you start weeping
& we decide we must go there. a dry cleaners 
without an attendant. pizza place that closed
ten years ago. nothing for us. nothing
for anyone. all the signs from dead places have
"coal" & "steel" & "slate" in the names. 
the mountain laughs sometimes. all the holes
in her lungs where men scrambled 
like rats in the dark. the trains that carried
her meat to the cities. now she watches
as the land swallows again. turns men
into coal. shoes hung from a telephone wire 
in a small town with nothing but a smoke shop
& a turkey hill. we wait at a spotlight,
alone, letting the ghosts march past 
in a little parade. you ask me, "are we going home?"
i answer, "no" & we keep driving on an empty tank. 
pull over & fill it with bones & pokeberries. 

against the odds

i am a pilot. i am making enough money
to eat quinces & wait for them to be ripe. 
i am a flower girl despite my gender
& despite there not being a wedding. i am 
a traveling salesperson without anything
in my bag to sell. i am sick of numbers
& their insistence on truth. i want to be extraordinary.
i want to be rich but in the fantasy way 
that doesn't involve exploiting people. 
the exception to the fire school. i do not want
to be the statistic girl or maybe i do. 
i love being several petals of survivor not because
of the violence but what i have done with it. 
you can run from the machine. you can build
a language that rejects it but you will still
have a little serial number just like a backpack. 
the number is older than even your gender.
a little matrix said, "this one will be degenerate 
& we will make everything harder than it needs to be."
i want to be your glossy statistic. big depression
& big anxiety & even bigger things i can't 
type on the internet without the words imploding. 
we begin to talk through omissions. 
afterall though, what is an "other" but the naming
of an absence. i am retiring early. i am fishing
on an afternoon with no hook or bait & no one hurts me. 
i spend a whole year without anyone 
following me home. i weep when i mistake a tree
for a man with knife. danger is so vast. there is 
the threat & then all the ways that threat
branches out to become wild. i am a sweet dragon.
i grow a banana tree in the middle of the living room
& despite all the odds, it bears fruit. 

mouse 

he feasted in the dark.
a hole nibbled in the bottom of the bag of rice.
bites taken from a ripe apple. he came alone
& told no one else where he went. 
the other mice scoured what was left
of the grain in the fields before
the farmers started tilling to prepare for new seeds
but he had found a portal near the kitchen sink
to enter through. 
i have been like him. selfish & telling myself,
"tonight is the last time." all the photos
of the moon. a pocket knife with someone else's
name etched into its torso. 
winter had just broken 
& the spring gave the mouse ideas 
about his next life. he ate with dreams
of becoming a bird. he imagined that 
all the horror he'd seen was part 
of the earth & that the sky must be holy.
in the morning i found his droppings in little zig-zags
across the utensil drawer & across the stove.
scrubbed everything clean over & over.
the chatter of knives. i tried to tell you that
i wanted to have a space of my own. wept one afternoon
about the car i sold when we first got together.
everything seemed possible then. now, i am running
through cracks in the roof towards any source of light.
i miss the apartment in the mountains 
where no one visited & my teeth 
were clean. we bought traps. finally caught him.
his eyes like blueberries. shiny & scared.
i walked him a mile out into the fields.
opened the door of the trap & told him,
"there are more places just like mine." i was not
thinking of him. i was thinking of me.
home has never been something planned
but rather where i end up. the fissure through which
i arrive. the bones i have chewed through.
i missed him when he did not return 
the next morning. still, i cleaned the forks & the spoons
as if he had been here. saw my reflection,
that of a scurrying creature, on the cutlery's necks. 

hope insurance

in the bad timeline (which we are in)
soon we will all be traveling salespeople. 
little briefcases full of bibles & wings
& sometimes insurance booklets.
no one is home anymore because we are
all traveling salespeople so we knock on 
empty houses that the rich people make us
pay just to look at. 
sign here. pray here. sleep here. sometimes
we pass each other. we are not allowed to trade
but we do anyway. a chocolate bar
for a photograph. a bed for a kiss. a gun
just to hear someone sing. weeks ago
the hope insurance salesman came through town 
& was preaching at the fountains.
he said, "who will take care of you
when don't you believe things can get better?"
he is always claiming he can insure hope. 
it doesn't do anything but he's not a con artist.
just a man with too many teeth. 
i know a few people who pay him. i think
they need to believe someone will catch them
when they inevitably cannot keep this shit up
anymore. they flock to him to worship.
i avoid hope these days. not because i do not think
it is useful but because i do not know how
to keep it up. maybe i am jealous of them.
envious that they still have something to insure.
i come upon a house without any windows.
there are salespeople swarming it. someone of them
have gone wild & decided to step inside. they lay
on day beds & let the wind blow through like a flute. 
soon the police will come. they are
traveling salespeople too. they peddle silence 
in exchange for guts. i get away. i plug my ears. 
open my suitcase recklessly 
& watch the birds fly into the tangerine dusk sky. 
i can always catch more but for tonight i don't
have to have anything. across the street another
salesperson hums, thinking she's alone or else 
she knows i am here & she wants to share her sound. 

trending

i feed the snake my feet. 
a riptide once took me to 
a mall without windows.
i bought a dog & had no where
to put her. 
there is a planet where nothing 
is urgent. everyone moves
like snails. dear god one day
i am going to be cancelled
& it'll be loud & glorious. 
i'll make a twitter account again
& log on to the evil receipt land.
an ad for fingers. an ad for teeth.
an ad for escape. two disasters
are kissing. now they've had a baby.
now we need to learn how to 
grow enough food to survive.
i just want to eat cereal
with my hands. get sugar beneath
my fingernails. in a dream i am
touring colleges again. i am seventeen
& still trying to figure out
how to be a girl. there is a celebrity 
who spontaneously combusted 
in the middle of a public park.
a maintenance worker is quoted saying,
"the ashes smelled sweet." if i pop up
in a conversation about witches 
try to defend me. lie for me
& tell them i am a good little goat farmer.
we name hurricanes because we know
they are someone's daughter.
the most trending audio right now
is the sound of a siren overlaid
with drumbeats. mostly, we have
stopped knowing what we're saying.
it is thursday so we talk about
the water spirits. i feed them chicken bones.
men demolish the old dixie cup factory. 
in the rubble there is a flip phone
with a picture of a ghost crouched inside. 

lime juice

i get a new terror early in the morning.
go into the kitchen & gather up all the knives
to bury them in the yard. we are getting 
new neighbors & i do not want them.
i threw a witch bottle into their yard 
when the realtor was walking around
with his office building face. i might regret it
i might not. i am so tired of being a body. 
do ghosts think "i am so tired of being a ghost?"
maybe the trees are content. i put my ear
to the trunk & i hear them complaining
about the bugs & the heat & the worms.
knife trees grow & we have an even bigger problem.
you ask me, "why don't you 
try to fight your compulsions?" i take you to stand
(at a safe distance) beside the knife trees. 
i explain, "they swell." once i started drinking
lime juice & i began with just a splash inside
my tea & then i was filling the whole glass
with lime juice. my mouth bloomed with ulcers
until i had to stop. a lime tree grew in 
my bathtub & labored to hide it
from everyone else in the apartment.
my mom keeps saying, "maybe the neighbors 
will be nice." she doesn't understand 
that i don't care if they're nice. i want 
everything to never move & stay the same.
i want the knives not to ripen & fall. i hoped
to get rid of them. use my teeth like god intended.
instead, they are always seeds. 
when the wind blows they sing like
windchimes. i go to take a shower & find
a fresh tree there. the limes, swollen & sour as ever.